RETURN OF THE NATIVE
By N. M. ROBERTS THE Welsh accents begin at Chester, and schizophrenia sets in with them. The corridor is full of rucksacks and climbing ropes ; the compartments of those dark, sharp-featured women, with loaded baikets and floral crepe dresses and fluent hands, whose voices, lilting as water and like water resistless, are a part of every bus and train journey in North Wales. Which side of the fence do you belong on, double-tongued, with your orthodox accent in both languages, even if the Welsh does creak a little ? Coming back after ten years, are you a walkin', fishin' starin' holiday-maker or the youngest son returned from his travels ? Will you look from the outside in or the inside out ? And what have ten years done to the country ?
Not .a lot, it seems, to that first deadly strip of concrete coastline, with its hydros and fried-fish shops and snob girls' schools. A holiday camp at Prestatyn, with terrace umbrellas, paintwork in Matisse pink and 'blue, shoe-shine boys and a bevy of young men with bodieS beautiful to make sure you keep your bile juice flowing. Otherwise the same parasitic growth of bungalows and the marvel- lous pigeon's-breast sea. Inland, torrents of blossom, lilac and laburnum and chestnut and hawthorn, and the sound of blasting from the quarry at Llandulas, sullen and symptomatic, following you most of the way to Llandudno. Granite and slate and lead up here, coal east and south. They have been chipping at the country, dragging the guts out of it, ever since they came, you think with a sudden, irrational resentment, and " they " at this moment are everybody from Edward I to the Lancashire cotton operative who pays honestly enough—through the nose, too, unless seaside landladies have changed a good deal—for seven days' sea air and the right to laugh at- our place names.
Llandudno is a missed chance. The bay flashes with a near-- Neapolitan blue ; the Great Orme heaves itself roughly out of the sea, the gulls radiant-raucous about it. Were it not for the accident of period we could have had a Brighton here, with Clough Williams- Ellis for our Nash. The real Border is the Conway Estuary. Wales begins on the far side, with the whitewashed farmhouses, the moun- tains marching down on you and the fierce Old Testament names of the chapels—Horeb and Hebron and Moriah. A decade slips away with the taste of scalded milk in your tea and the feather bed at night, and the Sunday shows you more best clothes than, normally, you see in a month.- Shorts and sunburn and nailed shoes, too, but almost all going with some kind of English accent.
The bus-drivers keep the elan which is Gallic rather than merely Celtic ; we rattle terrifyingly along the switchback road to Caernarvon, with glimpses of the Menai Straits jay blue below. The conductor has a row and a half of medal ribbons on his tunic. With the current shortage of teachers it's odds against his having a degree too. Ten 'years ago you could have staffed a multilateral school from the seasonal workers on the blue buses and the red. Even today, in July or August, you might have your ticket punched by an incipient bachelor of something. Three months is a long time to lie late in bed, hearing your father start out for the quarry every morning.
Caernarvon, as ever, is immense, mediaeval without being a museum piece. The castle is far less outmoded than he plaque commemo- rating the beneficence of the local squire—one of the Assheton- Smiths—who caused three houses in the square to be knocked down in order to provide an open space from which his loyal people could witness the investiture of Edward Prince of Wales in 1910. The Lloyd George statue, of course, with the reliefs showing him here in the village school, there in the council of the nations, is perennial. LI. G., in these parts, was always more of a national hero than a politician—little Davie Lloyd from Criccieth who went up to London and showed them all. Soon he will have hardened into a myth along with Cunedda N/Vledig and Arthur and Owain Glyndwr. The voices around you are three parts Welsh to one English and you know unerringly-whe will speak which. Or do you ? The woman in the good grey cardigan suit and the riding felt opens as confidingly as a flower to her own language with her own inflec- tions, but the solid countryman pushing a child in a go-cart from whom you ask the way in the correct Welsh formula bows and says: "You excuse, please. I speak no Welsh. I am Polish." The Commandos trained -up here during the war, and taught 'the locals that the equivalent of " Iechyd da ! " was " Zdrowie ! "
The next bus ride, to Llanberis, is even more hair-raising, The notices still say " Spitting strictly forbidden." What is the T.B. rate now, you wonder. This used to be the country of consumption and Calvinism. Now, instead of "Flee from the wrath to come ! " menacing us from the rock faces past which we are tearing, somebody has written " Rhydd i Gymru ! " No other evidence of how vigorous the movement is, and, so far, our pacifist incendiarists do not seem to have had a go at Billy Butlin, now said to be spreading his tentacles from Lleyn to the Goat at Beddgelert. Llyn Penis is. Prussian blue and a little sinister. The astounding slate terraces above it are everything from harebell to indigo, and beside the road they are putting up two-storey pre-fabs in the naive pink of first- coat paint. The place itself is repulsively full of the more inert type of tourist who is prised out of a lorig-nosed saloon car on to the platform of the Snowdon railway, and the woman where we hive tea maddens us by being servile when we speak. English and con- spiratorial when we drop into Welsh. Or are we falling into our national vice of suspicious touchiness ?
The next day we walk over the hills to Aber; where there are still two fangs of snow glittering in the mountain face above the water. The rocks are peopled by ravens ; the fields further down by small boys from Manchester, exposing mushroom-white torsos to a blistering sun. At the beginning of the path to the waterfall twin notices headed "Danger ! Perigl ! " say respectively, " Soldiers use bombs here that can kill you," and " Do not touch any unfamiliar object. It may explode and kill you." They make curiously little effect. Long before the bits of rusty metal littered the hillside death was there in the wind singing through the picked sheep's skulls and the maggots writhing in the stinking carcases of the ponies. You have a fancy that some day these mountains will shrug their shoulders or turn over in their sleep and tumble the accretions of a century into the Irish Sea, the battle schools- and the boarding houses and the salmon fishers and Billy Bodin and all. Not the Welsh, of course. When it is all over they will come out of their foxholes, quick and quiet and cunning as the, black and white collies who loll their tongues at you, showing their teeth in something that might be a grin or a menace.
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